PulsAPI vs IsDown: Catalog Size or Knowing What You Depend On

IsDown monitors a larger catalog (6,320+ services versus PulsAPI's 2461+) and includes SSL certificate monitoring and a Datadog integration. PulsAPI works the other way round: it connects to your AWS and GitHub accounts, works out which vendors your stack actually calls, and maps each one to the business capability it supports. It also does not cap how many services you monitor on Pro and above.

It depends on how many vendors you monitor. IsDown's Basic plan is $444/year, about $37/month as published, and includes 30 monitors. PulsAPI Pro is $59/month, or $49/month billed yearly, with no limit on monitored services. Below 30 vendors IsDown is cheaper; past its included monitor count you need a higher IsDown tier, while PulsAPI's price does not move. PulsAPI also has a free Starter plan that covers 10 services.

Three things. IsDown monitors roughly 20 times more services. It monitors SSL certificate expiry, which PulsAPI does not do at all. And it integrates with Datadog, which PulsAPI does not (PulsAPI monitors Datadog's own status, but does not send data into it). If any of those is a requirement, IsDown is the better fit.

PulsAPI is an IsDown alternative for teams that want stack auto-discovery, business capability impact mapping, and unlimited monitored services. StatusGator is the alternative for the widest catalog. Better Stack fits teams that want to monitor their own infrastructure rather than their vendors' status pages.

IsDown publishes 6,320+ services against PulsAPI's 2461+. PulsAPI's answer to the gap is discovery rather than catalog size: connect AWS or GitHub and it reports which vendors your stack depends on and how many of them are covered, so you can check against your real dependency list instead of a catalog count. Uncovered vendors can be added as custom service probes or requested.